


six feet under

by fawnlike (amainiris)



Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: Depression, M/M, Murder Husbands
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-25
Updated: 2020-06-25
Packaged: 2021-03-03 22:07:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,187
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24902812
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/amainiris/pseuds/fawnlike
Summary: The world bores him. If he hadn’t taken to killing, it would have been something else, but Abigail can’t imagine Hannibal indulging to excess in alcohol or women (or men). Even his murders are so precisely designed, his victims so exquisitely entrapped — their sitting rooms transformed into their morgues, their bedrooms into killing floors. Where they should have been safe, where no one should have ever harmed them.
Relationships: Abigail Hobbs & Hannibal Lecter, Will Graham & Abigail Hobbs, Will Graham/Hannibal Lecter
Comments: 10
Kudos: 49





	six feet under

**Author's Note:**

> Because I'm bored and still not sick of this show.

Sometimes she thinks she understands why Hannibal takes so much from his victims, and that frightens her.

She observes the artful configuration of the bodies, strung up in horrific displays — a neck opened or a vein slit, skin peeled beautifully from bone. At first Abigail thought that it was the killing itself that meant so much to him: the taking of a life as effortless as the saving, the last gasping exhale underneath his hands. Now, she’s not so sure. Now she wonders if it’s the humiliation suffered afterward, the organs harvested as neatly as vegetables, spooned into their willing mouths.

He takes so much from these people because he truly wants nothing at all.

*

The world bores him. If he hadn’t taken to killing, it would have been something else, but Abigail can’t imagine Hannibal indulging to excess in alcohol or women (or men). Even his murders are so precisely designed, his victims so exquisitely entrapped — their sitting rooms transformed into their morgues, their bedrooms into killing floors. Where they should have been safe, where no one should have ever harmed them.

It makes her sick sometimes, thinking of it — and then her thoughts flee to Nicholas Boyle, the twist of the knife in her hands, Hannibal’s benevolence like a father’s.

“Abigail,” he’d say, while she stared out at the dying autumn world, “What are you thinking of?”

 _What it would feel like to feel nothing,_ she wanted to say. _What it would feel like to be you._

“My dad,” she’d say, not turning. It was only half a lie.

Now she sits with Will and Hannibal at the long low table, candlelight painting their skin bronze as they pass the dishes between them. She’s buzzed from the two glasses of wine she’s been allowed because she can’t bear to eat what’s before her. She’d seen the woman’s family weeping on the local news, their faces as bewildered as children’s. Open, infantile, blind.

“You haven’t eaten anything,” Will says.

“I’m really not hungry,” she says, and looks down, stomach swimming at the sight.

This isn’t the family she’d wanted to find. This is less of a home than it is a final resting place. This is her mother and her father through a different lens, the light diluted and honey-gold: a prettier picture, maybe, but stark as ugliness underneath.

“You should eat something.” Will again, gentler this time. Abigail’s eyes go to his.

_You know what he is, and you’re still here._

_But so am I._

She lifts her fork. She can feel the eyes of them on her like a brand. It’s not the sort of glance that men give to girls her age, indecent and somehow ashamed; it’s reassuring and steady, with all the weight of a promise. They want nothing from her but her willingness to keep them a secret, to bury her complicit stupidity deep in the earth beside her father.

Hannibal said it was lamb. Again, she thinks, a half-truth. They’re both good at those.

Abigail takes a bite, chews, swallows. There’s gristle in her throat, the aftertaste of something sweet that can’t be wine.

She smiles.

*

Abigail has always known there was something between them. She just didn’t know it was this.

Nothing exists to Will but Hannibal and Abigail’s resentful neediness flounders beside it. Sometimes Hannibal simply glances at the other man — just a glance, brief and light as a moth’s wings — and that hideous jealousy flowers in her, rooted deep in her chest. She should know it for what it is. She shouldn’t feel the sudden blossoming burst of envy when she remembers Hannibal’s hands, warm with blood, slide over hers; she should accept, as she did when her parents died, that some people love one another in all the worst ways. But she can’t.

Sometimes, sick with her sense of homelessness, she curls on one of Hannibal’s couches and steadily drinks from one of his overpriced bottles of wine. She drinks until she’s almost ill; until her mother’s face is blurred; until she forgets that her new beautiful home is just as lonely and strange as her old one.

*

Of course there’s a thrill to it.

The undeniable sense of ‘ _he chose me.’_

Or, perhaps more accurately: _he spared_ me.

But she’s sure that’s what those stupid women think when they write to criminals doing life for the murder of innocent children, too. Men (people) like Hannibal aren’t as terribly discriminating as they think they are; instead they attach themselves to their victims like flies, sucking blood from bone.

*

Watching the pair of them, sometimes, is dizzying. She wonders if Will compartmentalizes like the other man does, if that’s how he can bear to live this way. Then she wonders the same about herself.

The truth means nothing anymore, to either of them; they’re both indebted to Hannibal, and his presence permeates every aspect of their existence. The two men are proud, and lonely, and proud of that loneliness; what they share with one another, they never share with her.

She only sees them touch a handful of times. It’s mostly little gestures: a hand to a wrist, the brush of fingertips over an arm. Small things, things that would mean nothing if not for the wealth of purpose infused in them. She also knows that men don’t really touch like that, not like women do, but it’s not until Hannibal cradles her to him so convincingly in that austere kitchen does she realize what his embrace lacks. He’s kind in his way, she thinks, but never warm.

Sometimes she hears them, though. Through walls, or from behind doors, little muted whispers or murmurs or (worst of all) the harsh surprise of Will’s laugh, agitated and always somehow grim, as if he won’t allow himself the humor. She hates that Hannibal can make him laugh, and she hates that she can’t; in those moments she despises them both, and the ill-fitting existence they’ve shaped out for her to endure.

And then the murmurs will fade into something even softer, something almost gentle, and Abigail’s stomach will twist and she’ll leave the house to go stand in autumn’s breathless cold, wondering why her life couldn’t be anything more than this.

*

“Do you have it, Will?”

Will looks over at Hannibal, and that impossible something passes between them again, the secrecy so private as to be sick. “The knife?”

Abigail should flinch from these words, from both the implication and the memory. God knows she should. But inside of her there’s just an impossible emptiness, a lack. The space that Hannibal has carved.

They’re going to kill again tonight, she knows. They’re going to drive out of state and Hannibal is going to park the car at some violently lit-up motel. Afterwards there will be nothing to show for it but an elaborately constructed memorial, the body of Hannibal’s victim strung up like some gruesome puppet. No dignity in death, Abigail thinks; her parents, after all, had gotten very little as well.

“It’s by me,” she says softly from her spot at the table, and passes Hannibal the knife.


End file.
